Road trip USA: Parts 1 & 2

Okay, I'm in the middle of that road trip right now, stealing wireless from some random campsite. I've been blogging every now and then about our adventures, and I'll be posting them in parts. This first one is called...

San Fran frenzy
(Scooter quest)

The road trip really began a few days before we got the car. Liza flew in on Memorial Day Monday, and after an early night, we commenced being tourists when we hit downtown San Francisco, doing a tour of the city's sights. We did the outer landmarks, including the Embarcadero, Fisherman's Wharf, Alcatraz, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Liza also got persuaded into buying some lenses for her camera since they were being sold for a really low price at Fisherman's Wharf (in some cases more than half off of what she would have paid in England). Unfortunately, the weather was quite cloudy when we went, which is rather typical of San Francisco, so the photos that were taken weren't incredible. After a short photo shoot at the bridge, we decided to head home. We ended up taking a bus that ran for about an hour before it reached the train station, and by the time we got home, it was about 9 at night.

The next day was a bit of a mission to find some mini scooters. We hadn't originally planned to get them, but as we were walking to the bus stop in the morning, we saw a kid riding along on one, and agreed that it would save us a lot of walking, as well as provide a lot of entertainment. We reached the city a couple of hours before noon, and had a bit of a feed after checking out Union Square. The shopping mall where we ate (a Westfield, oddly enough) did not seem to have any of the scooters and, according to one of the clerks in the Volcom shop, there weren't any places nearby that sold them. Fortunately, she gave us an address of a shop that she thought might sell them, and it close to where we were headed, so we soon set off.

The next stop was Chinatown. Hiking was not something that we were very happy to do, as we were both tired from the previous day, but we braved the hills to reach our goal - the fortune cookie factory. It was just a little hole-in-the-wall in a small alley, and at first we couldn't really locate it, but a nice old man called us over and ushered us in, giving us a free hot sample to eat and urging us to buy a bag. I'm not really a big fortune cookie fan, but Liza loves them, so she bought a huge packet of them. The store that supposedly sold the scooters was nowhere to be found and, the two of us not wanting to climb any more hills, decided to finally head downhill towards downtown again.

We stopped off for a smoothie at Carl's Jr. then headed off back to the Golden Gate Bridge in the hopes of getting shots in better weather. However, that was not so easy. After looking for the proper bus stop for 10 minutes, we waited about another hour for a bus that never came. We decided that catching a different route would be the best idea, but that didn't quite work out as planned either. The next bus ended up getting delayed 10-20 minutes, and when we finally got to the bridge, we find out that the weather had not greatly improved over the past day. We took a few more photos both off and on the bridge, and finally headed home, a lot earlier than the day before, with no scooters in hand.

A ray of hope finally shone upon us when my aunt informed me that the nearby Target possibly stocked the elusive devices. Like little children on Christmas morning, the two of us got impossibly excited, topped only by our childish giggling when we finally bought the things that we had struggled to find all day. At last, success!

We didn't do much at all the following day. A bit of scootering around was about the extent of the excitement for that day, which mostly involved watching some TV and getting food.

We finally picked up the car on the first of June, the Friday, and we promptly loaded it up with food and water supplies as well as some of our bags. Liza got the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road pretty quickly, and we once again watched TV for the rest of the day. That was, of course, until I went to watch Arcade Fire at Berkeley.

It was a rather stressful drive over to the UC Berkeley Greek Theatre. I was driving alone as Liza didn't really know who Arcade Fire were, and couldn't afford buying a ticket to the show anyway. It was all well and good until the start of the Oakland Bay Bridge, which had the most horrible merge ever imaginable. Combine that with a car with really bad blind spots, and it was a recipe for a bad drive. Still, I did make it to the gig fine, after about an hour of driving and 10 minutes of looking for somewhere to park. It was a really great set at a nice outdoor venue. I got home just past midnight to fall asleep for about four hours.

Part 2

Bad weather
(A cruise down the California coast)

The road trip proper began at around 6am on Saturday morning. Liza took the first shift of the driving, which ended up being a marathon 10-hour shift (stops included) as she didn't really feel like switching around. The trip itself wasn't too remarkable. We only did a few stops at some scenic points or points of interest, and stops for food and fuel. Fuel was quite ridiculously priced on the road, even more so than in San Francisco. We filled only as much as we needed at expensive stops, and as much as we could at the cheaper ones.

At the end of the scenic stretch of beaches in the south part of highway 1, we finally reached Santa Monica, quite earlier than we had actually expected. Despite Liza being stressed out by the city driving, and thus getting me to find parking once we reached the city, we still had enough time to check out the beach at Santa Monica. I went for a bit of a swim, which was quite pleasant. We went to bed kind of early to try to get up early for the next day of tourism.

The agenda for Tuesday was going to Hollywood in the morning, and then back to the beach in the afternoon, and to some extend that did go to plan. We made it to Hollywood at about 9:30 after a good hour of public transport. The main attractions were Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the walk of fame, and the Hollywood sign, which was barely visible through the LA smog. I gotta say that while the charm of Santa Monica has changed my view of LA, I still think that most areas are quite unlivable.

When we got back to Santa Monica in the afternoon, it was still rather cloudy, so instead of going back to have a swim at the beach, we instead decided to check out the Santa Monica pier, home of a carnival type atmosphere, and have a scooter around Venice Beach. It was an experience that was both relaxing and tiring at the same time. Due to this, we soon went to bed after having an early dinner.

Disneyland was the next stop. The cloud soon subsided once we reached the park and the heat wasn't very welcoming. We tried to stay in the shade as much as possible, sometimes even going on a long indoor queue for a ride just to avoid the sun. The theme of the day was breakdown. For some odd reason, 3 of the rides that we wanted to go on were at one point temporarily out of order. Space Mountain was the most notable because of the fact that we were walking around for about 3 hours doing random stuff while we waited for it to be reopened, which was a bit annoying, because Space Mountain is probably the best ride Disneyland has to offer. Rumour has it that somebody had gotten stuck on it. When it did manage to reopen, there was a stampede after somebody shouted "Space Mountain is open!" and the queue was cascading within minutes of operations commencing. We were lucky to have a 'FastPass' that got us to the front of the queue right away, which was handy.

We soon left as the sun started to go down, and went back to our hotel room across the street. It was very conveniently located, but rather expensive. After short tourist moments at Laguna Beach, which was plagued once again by the bad weather (it had actually started to rain when we got there) and San Diego the day after, we were headed into the desert, where the bulk of our journey would take place.